named on the title page is left out of the loop. In a fraudulent memoir, the
flesh-and-blood author constructs a version of himself that is itself at least
partially fraudulent.
(5) Our sense that we both come to know an author through reading his
or her text and to recognize that the author has a life independent of the iden-
tity projected in the text. This point is especially applicable to our reading of
autobiographical narrative.
Conceiving of the implied author as a version of the flesh-and-blood
author responsible for the purposive design governing the text also means
that the implied author is an active agent rather than simply the product of
the text or the reader’s inferences. We ought not to confuse how we come to
know an implied author with the implied author herself. In Dan Shen’s helpful
terms, the implied author encodes the text; the reader decodes it, and through
that decoding comes to know the implied author.
THE IMPLIED AUTHOR, NONFICTION NARRATIVE, AND
DEFICIENT NARRATION
As I noted in chapter 3, in The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion tells the
story of her life during the year after the fatal heart attack suffered by her
husband, John Gregory Dunne, in December 2003. During that year, Didion
has to deal not only with her grief about John but also with the stress of her
daughter Quintana’s life-threatening illness. The implied Didion writes about
her experiences with admirable frankness and insight, establishing her narrat-
ing-I as a reliable spokesperson and initially emphasizing the interpretive and
occasionally ethical distance between that I and the narrated-I—or, as I pre-
fer, experiencing-I—even as she insists on the continuity between them. The
narrating-I exposes the experiencing-I’s “magical thinking,” the various mech-
anisms she used to keep from accepting the irreversibility of John’s death: if
she doesn’t discard his shoes, for example, then he will be able to return for
them. As the narrative progresses, the distance between the narrating-I and
the experiencing-I diminishes until, finally, they converge in their joint affir-
mation of John’s lesson that “you had to go with the change” (232). Crucial
to this process of acceptance is the experiencing-I’s response to the autopsy
report, a response that both the narrating-I and the implied Didion endorse.
This report, which did not arrive until “early December 2004” (199), is crucial
because it allows the experiencing-I to accept that she was not responsible
for John’s heart attack, and with that acceptance she is able to extricate her-
self from much of her magical thinking. The problem, however, is that within
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